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If you think Apple fans can be rabid, check out Amiga fans :-) -- I frequently got flamed by fellow Amiga users for having a realistic view of the Amiga's limit

If you think Apple fans can be rabid, check out Amiga fans :-) -- I frequently got flamed by fellow Amiga users for having a realistic view of the Amiga's limitations (such as not having a single usable word-processor -- and do not say ProWrite or Excellence -- neither could handle a 10-page document without choking). Commodore did not turn an operating profit during any year in which they were selling the Amiga. The idea that it was just a patent troll is ridiculous. The Amiga was ridiculously superior to the Mac as a piece of hardware (ignoring the lack of a good graphics mode for doing office work on -- you could pick between flickering display and rectangular graphics). It's OS was absolutely awful (AmigaDOS 1.3 or 1.4 -- don't remember which -- was actually created by Commodore licensing the ARP from hobbyists who'd rewritten most of the OS to suck less.)

cromwellian 13y ago
If you want to talk about exactly what triggered the entering in Bankruptcy, it was the injunction caused by the XOR patent preventing the CD32 from shipping. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32) Commodore stupidly went "all in" on the console market, no one knows if it would have been another Pippin, Dreamcast, etc failure. But it is not ridiculous, Commodore had moved manufacturing to the Phillipines and if there was no injunction, it is likely CD32 shipments (demand exceeded supply) would have repaid the short term debt they racked up allowing the company to continue as a going concern. You may argue they would have been doomed eventually, but remember, Apple itself was almost bankrupt at one point. Also, you claim about operating profits is false. One Google search was all it took to debunk, http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_irving-gould-amiga-sales http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_ir... in 1989, EPS was $1.2 and the Amiga was selling well. AmigaDOS was awful? Compared to what? The MacOS at the time was extremely primitive and ugly. Amiga had a real shell, it had ARexx, vastly superior to AppleScript, it had the equivalent of FUSE filesystems for tons of stuff, compression, networking (DNet), I regularly multitasked between my terminal/dialup and my programming environment. "Workbench", the drag-and-drop "Finder" equivalent was ugly and shitty, but Amiga users didn't use it for much anyway. Yes, the Amiga was not a good "office" computer, it was a home computer, and in that regard, for the market it was targeting -- grown up 8-bitters, it blew away the Mac hard. I had a MacSE, it sat in a closet and in fact, running a MacOS emulator on my Amiga was a better experience than running the real Mac, and I only ran the Mac when I needed to run something required for college that was not available for the Amiga, and that was rare. Nobody I knew in my age range when the Amiga came out gave a hoot about Word Perfect or Excel. The Amiga had perfectly usable, "Google Docs"-like simple word processors that were perfectly fine for most work. I did a lot of my college work with an awesome text editor and LaTeX on the Amiga. There is nothing the Mac really had over the Amiga in it's day, except for AppleTalk, and some high end DTP software, at huge expense. For the home user, especially the creative person interested in art, music, or coding, the Amiga was far better. Compare MacPaint vs DigiPaint for example. Commodore lost their lead by the time the MacII color and PC SVGA rolled out, because they did not put priority into new custom chipsets until it was too late. AGA/AAA arrived way after it had been surpassed by commodity SVGA cards, and the radical designs Dave Hayne/Jay Miner and others were working on for next-generation 3D graphics chips for the Amiga never got the resources. Ultimately, they failed by mismanagement, but the fact that it took the industry 5-7 years to catch up with Amiga Hardware is a testament to how far ahead, how much of a step-function change, the Amiga was. It was the iPhone of 1985 IMHO, but too much ahead of it's time. (BTW, the flickering issue in hires for people who needed it, was fixed by Flicker Fixers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer)
- podperson 13y ago
  What triggered the bankruptcy is pretty irrelevant. Commodore had been losing money for the entire time the Amiga was on sale and circling the drain. As someone who was both an ardent Amiga and Mac user, yes AmigaDOS was awful. Yes, it was a multi-tasking DOS -- awesome. The utility of the multi-tasking in AmigaDOS (given the way applications split screen real estate -- i.e. into horizontal bands) was in practice far inferior to what Apple kludged with desk accessories, switcher, and eventually multifinder. AmigaDOS also used weird and inconsistent command-line conventions (that ARP made both better and more consistent). In any event, there's no point having multitasking if there are no decent applications. Amiga had, basically, DeluxePaint, games, and lots of cool software for facilitating piracy. (The Mac ports of DeluxePaint -- Studio/32 and Studio/8 -- were among my favorite all time applications.) > BTW, the flickering issue in hires for people who needed it Yes, having a third party hardware solution so you can display halfway decent office software is great. When I needed this, it wasn't available.
  - icedchai 13y ago
    You could have multiple applications running on a single Amiga "screen". I remember running several windowed apps right on the Workbench. AmigaDOS was pretty damn weird though. No arguments there.

cromwellian 13y ago

If you want to talk about exactly what triggered the entering in Bankruptcy, it was the injunction caused by the XOR patent preventing the CD32 from shipping. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_CD32) Commodore stupidly went "all in" on the console market, no one knows if it would have been another Pippin, Dreamcast, etc failure. But it is not ridiculous, Commodore had moved manufacturing to the Phillipines and if there was no injunction, it is likely CD32 shipments (demand exceeded supply) would have repaid the short term debt they racked up allowing the company to continue as a going concern. You may argue they would have been doomed eventually, but remember, Apple itself was almost bankrupt at one point. Also, you claim about operating profits is false. One Google search was all it took to debunk, http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_irving-gould-amiga-sales http://articles.philly.com/1989-02-01/business/26154229_1_ir... in 1989, EPS was $1.2 and the Amiga was selling well. AmigaDOS was awful? Compared to what? The MacOS at the time was extremely primitive and ugly. Amiga had a real shell, it had ARexx, vastly superior to AppleScript, it had the equivalent of FUSE filesystems for tons of stuff, compression, networking (DNet), I regularly multitasked between my terminal/dialup and my programming environment. "Workbench", the drag-and-drop "Finder" equivalent was ugly and shitty, but Amiga users didn't use it for much anyway. Yes, the Amiga was not a good "office" computer, it was a home computer, and in that regard, for the market it was targeting -- grown up 8-bitters, it blew away the Mac hard. I had a MacSE, it sat in a closet and in fact, running a MacOS emulator on my Amiga was a better experience than running the real Mac, and I only ran the Mac when I needed to run something required for college that was not available for the Amiga, and that was rare. Nobody I knew in my age range when the Amiga came out gave a hoot about Word Perfect or Excel. The Amiga had perfectly usable, "Google Docs"-like simple word processors that were perfectly fine for most work. I did a lot of my college work with an awesome text editor and LaTeX on the Amiga. There is nothing the Mac really had over the Amiga in it's day, except for AppleTalk, and some high end DTP software, at huge expense. For the home user, especially the creative person interested in art, music, or coding, the Amiga was far better. Compare MacPaint vs DigiPaint for example. Commodore lost their lead by the time the MacII color and PC SVGA rolled out, because they did not put priority into new custom chipsets until it was too late. AGA/AAA arrived way after it had been surpassed by commodity SVGA cards, and the radical designs Dave Hayne/Jay Miner and others were working on for next-generation 3D graphics chips for the Amiga never got the resources. Ultimately, they failed by mismanagement, but the fact that it took the industry 5-7 years to catch up with Amiga Hardware is a testament to how far ahead, how much of a step-function change, the Amiga was. It was the iPhone of 1985 IMHO, but too much ahead of it's time. (BTW, the flickering issue in hires for people who needed it, was fixed by Flicker Fixers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer)

podperson 13y ago
What triggered the bankruptcy is pretty irrelevant. Commodore had been losing money for the entire time the Amiga was on sale and circling the drain. As someone who was both an ardent Amiga and Mac user, yes AmigaDOS was awful. Yes, it was a multi-tasking DOS -- awesome. The utility of the multi-tasking in AmigaDOS (given the way applications split screen real estate -- i.e. into horizontal bands) was in practice far inferior to what Apple kludged with desk accessories, switcher, and eventually multifinder. AmigaDOS also used weird and inconsistent command-line conventions (that ARP made both better and more consistent). In any event, there's no point having multitasking if there are no decent applications. Amiga had, basically, DeluxePaint, games, and lots of cool software for facilitating piracy. (The Mac ports of DeluxePaint -- Studio/32 and Studio/8 -- were among my favorite all time applications.) > BTW, the flickering issue in hires for people who needed it Yes, having a third party hardware solution so you can display halfway decent office software is great. When I needed this, it wasn't available.
- icedchai 13y ago
  You could have multiple applications running on a single Amiga "screen". I remember running several windowed apps right on the Workbench. AmigaDOS was pretty damn weird though. No arguments there.